Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology

Some felt these things were connected. Wang Zhao, for one, was a reformer who believed that a simpler way to write spoken Chinese was essential to the survival of the nation. Wang’s idea was to use a set of phonetic symbols, representing one specific dialect of Chinese. If people could sound out words, having memorized just a handful of shapes the way speakers of languages using an alphabet did, they could become literate more quickly. With literacy, they could learn technical skills, study science, and help China get ownership of its future back. 

Wang believed in this goal so strongly that though he’d been thrown out of China in 1898, he returned two years later in disguise. After arriving by boat from Japan, he traveled over land on foot in the costume of a Buddhist monk. His story forms the first chapter of Jing Tsu’s book, and it is thick with drama, including a shouting match and brawl on the grounds of a former palace, during a meeting to decide which dialect a national version of such a system should represent. Wang’s system for learning Mandarin was used by schools in Beijing for a few years, but ultimately it did not survive the rise of competing systems and the period of chaos that swallowed China not long after the Qing Dynasty’s fall in 1911. Decades of disorder and uneasy truces gave way to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in northern China in 1931. For a long time, basic survival was all most people had time for.

However, strange inventions soon began to turn up in China. Chinese students and scientists abroad had started to work on a typewriter for the language, which they felt was lagging behind others. Texts in English and other tongues using Roman characters could be printed swiftly and cheaply with keyboard-controlled machines that injected liquid metal into type molds, but Chinese texts required thousands upon thousands of bits of type to be placed in a manual printing press. And while English correspondence could be whacked out on a typewriter, Chinese correspondence was still, after all this time, written by hand.      

Of all the technologies Mullaney and Tsu describe, these baroque metal monsters stick most in the mind. Equipped with cylinders and wheels, with type arrayed in starbursts or in a massive tray, they are simultaneously writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize a language. Because Chinese characters don’t have an inherent order (no A-B-C-D-E-F-G) and because there are so many (if you just glance at 4,000 of them, you’re not likely to spot the one you need quickly), people tried to arrange these bits of type according to predictable rules. The first article ever published by Lin Yutang, who would go on to become one of China’s most prominent writers in English, described a system of ordering characters according to the number of strokes it took to form them. He eventually designed a Chinese typewriter that consumed his life and finances, a lovely thing that failed its demo in front of potential investors.

Technology often seems to demand new ways of engaging with the physical, and the Chinese typewriter was no exception. When I first saw a functioning example, at a private museum in a basement in Switzerland, I was entranced by the gliding arm and slender rails of the sheet-cake-size device, its tray full of characters. “Operating the machine was a full-body exercise,” Tsu writes of a very early typewriter from the late 1890s, designed by an American missionary. Its inventor expected that with time, muscle memory would take over, and the typist would move smoothly around the machine, picking out characters and depressing keys.